Coffee Run: White Album comes with black coffee

Dave Bidini’s new column, “Coffee Run,” will portray the city one coffee shop at a time. Each piece will also feature comments on a weekly book and record as a soundtrack to the writer’s caffeine journey.

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It was the late-80s. We were parked outside the Patrician Grill on King Street west of Sherbourne. A large idling truck backed up before thudding into our front fender, leaving it hang-nailed off the body. From the truck emerged two very small men wearing baseball caps and old bomber jackets. They looked sorrowful and a little worried as they gestured for us to follow them across the street.

We ended up at a desk busy with papers and order forms in the backroom of Dinetz Restaurant Supply, an old Clyde Fans establishment lost in time. Sitting behind the desk was Sid Dinetz. Sid looked at his two drivers, then rubbed his face. “Not again, guys. Tell me it didn’t happen again.”

We explained the situation to Sid, who offered us all of the utilitarian kitchenware we needed in exchange for our bumper. Living with my parents at the time, I told him that we had it covered. Sid fixed our bumper and the two small men kept their jobs.

Twenty years ago and pre-Distillery, the neighbourhood around the Patrician looked nothing like it does today. When I first moved into the area, I was excited knowing that I’d be living so close to the Derby, the old tavern where Ernest Hemingway kept a second-floor bedsit while writing for the Toronto Star. But the Derby fell into disrepair, closing a few years later. In the late ’90s, encouraged by the brightening city and the presence of the Distillery, sparkling and expensive furniture shops moved in, transforming the area. Now, all that’s left of Muddy York is the Enoch Turner School House, Sid Dinetz and the Patrician. I decided that it was a good time to visit the diner before age takes it from the street.

The first thing I notice after walking into the diner is a small Beatles shrine: Sergeant Pepper’s figures and a Yellow Submarine lunchbox sitting alongside the shop’s button cash register. The register is chiming along to The White Album, which is joined by a polyrhythm of knives and forks on plates, toasters being popped, meat hitting the lunch counter grill and drinks slurped through straws. The sounds are as exotic as they are familiar, and really, it’s not as if Ringo can’t use the help.

At the Patrician, the fare is announced to patrons in fat black letters hand-painted on cardboard signs with single quotes around ‘Banquet Burger’ and ‘Hot Turkey’ and, sometimes, double-quotes: Pie Served Hot “NOW.” And just in case the nature of the room — chattering short order cooks, leather booths, milkshakes foamed in Hamilton Beach cylinders, stools that spin, and salads served in fake-wood bowls — isn’t entirely clear to the distracted BlackBerry’ed patron, a framed painting of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks hangs on a wall at the far end of the room. I order my coffee and drink it hot and black. The White Album gives way to the Best of Paul McCartney which gives way to Abbey Road.

I should have an old copy of the Toronto Telegram unleafed at my table — maybe a Star column by Milt Dunnell about Ned Hanlon or Gaylord Powless — but instead I open The Lives of Conn Smythe by Kelly McParland. It’s a rich book that conjures a time lost even before the Patrician’s lost time: the ’20s and ’30s through the Second World War, during which the Major had his second military tour. It was in France where he was badly injured, suffering injuries that, McParland writes, would make him cruelly sensitive to even the slightest drop in temperature.

At the end of his life, friends of mine would see him at the old Greenwood Racetrack bundled in blankets and fedora, scribbling on his racing form. Looking out the window of the Patrician, I see that the weather has turned: cold and driving wet rain on a once-bright Thursday afternoon.

Through the pages, I shiver a moment, close the book and order more coffee: hotter, blacker. Next to my booth, a hat rack peg supports my brown fedora. It hangs there light and tilted as the waitress fills my cup.

National Post

Dave Bidini is a Toronto musician and writer whose new book, Writing Gordon Lightfoot, comes out this month.

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